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The prime minister wants to focus on helping big companies and suppressing wages. So quit bugging him with all this Mike Duffy stuff, writes Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper walks past the honour guard at the government palace in Lima, Peru, on Wednesday. Harper is on a trade mission to Peru and Colombia. (May 22, 2013) (MARIANA BAZO / REUTERS)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the Senate scandal is a distraction. He says the real issue is the economy. Let us take him at his word and see what he is doing about this thing called the economy.

First, note that he is in South America on what his office calls a trade mission. On Wednesday, he was in Peru. On Thursday, he is scheduled to be in Colombia.

But note also that when Harper refers to trade, he doesn’t use the word in its usual sense. Canada does not sell much to either Peru or Colombia. Nor does it buy much. Peru accounts for less than one per cent of Canadian imports and exports.

When Harper says trade, he means investment. In particular, he means mining investment.

The prime minister is in South America on behalf of Canadian mining firms who hope to invest there without hindrance. To that end, his government has tied Canadian aid to the needs of the mining industry. On Wednesday, the prime minister announced $53 million worth of such aid for Peru.

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There is nothing intrinsically wrong with helping out Canadian mining companies. But aiding Canadian-based mining firms in their activities abroad does little for unemployed miners in Canada.

The wealth generated by mines in Peru or Colombia will flow to the owners of these projects. There is no reason to believe that those owners will use that money to create jobs here.

If they follow their current pattern, they will use their profits to develop more mines abroad.

Indeed, we can get a better idea of how the Harper government treats rank and file mine workers by looking at a court case in British Columbia.

On Tuesday, a federal court judge dismissed a complaint by two unions who had charged that Ottawa allowed a British Columbia mining company to import 201 temporary foreign workers from China, even though qualified Canadians were available.

Some of those Canadians said they were turned away because of their inability to speak Mandarin.

It’s important to point out here that Justice Russel Zinn based his ruling very narrowly on whether the government had followed the law as written.

His judgment was not a comment on the validity of the temporary foreign workers program itself — a program that suppresses wages by giving employers near carte blanche to import foreign workers for jobs ranging from factory hand to fast-food barista.

So is Stephen Harper focused on the economy? The answer is yes if the fate of Canadian mining companies hoping to operate in South America is at issue.

But if we are talking about the fate of unemployed Canadians seeking well-paying jobs at home, the answer is less clear.

Finally, unions. Harper may be disappointed in some of those he picked to sit in the Senate. But he is looking to his Conservative majority in the upper chamber to ram through a law that the government says is designed to make trade unions more accountable.

Bill C-377, which has already been passed by the Conservative-dominated Commons, would require unions to publicly detail how they spend their funds. The ostensible excuse is that union members are able to claim dues as tax breaks.

Yet others who claim membership dues as tax breaks — such as lawyers and doctors — are not affected by the bill.

So what is the real reason for this bill? Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, who on this issue is breaking with his party, put it well.

“This bill is about a nanny state,” he said earlier this year. “It has an anti-labour bias running rampant; and it diminishes the imperative of free speech, freedom of assembly and free collective bargaining . . . Where we are headed with this bill is down a very dark alley to a very dark place.”

Dark indeed. Abuse of civil rights; jobs for foreigners; aid to big companies. These are the grave economic issues from which Harper does not want to be distracted.

And the $90,000 payment from his then chief of staff to Sen. Mike Duffy? In Peru, Harper told reporters he didn’t know anything about it.

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